Mark Falkin - The Late Bloomer

But if I did that, wouldn’t the scavenging dogs—literally, figuratively—come to pull him apart too? Can I be so callous as to think otherwise? Maybe it wouldn’t happen days later, a month, but they’d come for him—the vulnerable one separated from the rest.

When Nate crept past me, did he know he went out to collect his death with that basket? Or was he trying to show me, and himself, that he had changed, that he wasn’t afraid to go alone? Did he think going out to collect eggs on his own at dawn was the threshold he had to breach to be old-world Nate again? Would his head not hurt when he tried to remember? Did he hope to convince the kids that they could do it, too?

Was it expiation? Self-sacrifice, throwing himself to the dogs to satiate the beast they feared?

Did the kids get into his head, force him into that vicious dawn? Never mind the dogs, go outside with the egg basket .

Maybe some are trying to break away, enduring the headache, looking for themselves again. Maybe Nate caught that wave. Maybe Johnny can.

It’s the ones looking for their old selves again. They’re the ones who need me. They’re the ones who sing and guide me downriver now.

Johnny was my objective. I gripped the steering wheel and smiled at Maggie.

Here we came onto the iconic green road sign: Austin City Limits . The headlights were on by default due to the gray day. When the light filled the sign in a flash of white, that’s when Nate’s flanged screams filled my ears, his panicked eyes beseeching the dawn sky for solace through gnashing teeth and flying fur filled my eyes.

I spied a police car on the shoulder of MoPac near the Windsor Road exit. Keys in the ignition. I wanted speed. I wanted search lights. Maggie hopped in. “K9 unit?” She wagged her tail. We were good again.

I flicked on the loud siren, ran it for a few cycles. Echoing, echoing. Maggie ducked at the noise. I kept the lights on as I cruised at cop speed, Barney Fife sniffing, wrist-driving. Emergency. Clear the area, everyone.

On the Congress Avenue bridge. A wintry front’s wind spread and chased ripples across Lady Bird Lake.

Lamar’s yellow lines blurred. In my fog and blear on this last stretch of road home, I realized they’d been trying to tell me since June that this moment came. Johnny, standing in my room, his eyes fixed in sleepwalk, mumbling— coming… coming… close… close… close … shifting his weight back and forth on his feet. Simon, his pale face in the green bordering Memorial Park Cemetery, had said the kids feared a beast.

From writing my essay I’d learned that “lord of the flies” translates in Hebrew to Ba’alzevuv .

In Greek… Beelzebub .

My house looked like a shipwreck from the age of the Barbary pirates, cannon-shot and listing. The other houses looked as they always did. Now that the cold had come, the yards weren’t weedy. It was possible to believe the neighborhood was simply experiencing a sleepy Sunday.

When we pulled up, cats flew from the holes and disappeared. In the middle of the street about four houses up stood a coyote frozen in mid-lope with its ears perked. It watched us get out of the car. I stood behind the open door and stared at it. It stared back at me like I was a dead man walking, then completed its unhurried crossing into a yard where I lost sight of it.

Exhausted. There’s no hero in me.

From the street, I hear it. This flapping. We walk to the porch and I see paper under a stone sitting atop my trombone case in the entryway.

It’s a foot-long receipt from the Dollar Tree dated September 24. It’s folded in half. On one side is written a note [18] A copy of both sides of this document is attached as Exhibit C. I’ve seen before:

512-455-4688 call me to discuss all things pseudo-intellectual

Kodie had left this note for me in my cubby in the storeroom on that day. I’d asked for her number several times. She’d been coy. But then on that day she gave it to me and I had called her and that night we went out to dinner. We got looped on free margaritas, the bartender dude giving me the stink eye the whole time because I think he was one of her wanna-bes but never-wases. Then we’d gone up to Ginny’s Little Longhorn, this tiny, bar painted UT burnt orange with a Baptist church steeple on top. They wouldn’t let us in so we hung out with the regulars in lawn chairs in the parking lot, the door open. We listened to a country band covering Beatles songs. She sat on my lap and we kissed and the regulars all said awwww .

I’d kept it folded in my desk drawer, thinking someday I’d show it to her when we were older and have a laugh. I turned it over.

In the same handwriting, but different ink, the text uneven and slanted, it read

Kevin, Come down

We can start over

Adam and Eve just like you said

The euphoria I felt knowing she was alive was dampened by the weirdness. It doesn’t sound like her. More like Nate’s somnambulistic oratory, but with a pen.

I never told her about how I thought we could be like Adam and Eve. I’d only thought about it. I’ve only told you, dear reader.

Maybe innately is farfetched, but to describe how I knew where she was, that’s the best word I can come up with. Although she could’ve given a specific location ( lacking in specificity ), she doesn’t, or the kids don’t want her to. My quest. Up to me.

I figured I didn’t have much of a choice.

When she says “come down,” in my mind’s eye I’m looking south from atop Mount Bonnell on the morning of. That wave rolling. So calm in its progress. I know that’s the direction I’m to go.

I remember thumbing Jespers’s copy of Heart of Darkness in the stack under Lord of the Flies , Kurtz declaring, “My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my—”

The river. Kodie waits for me where the Colorado River unburdens itself into the Matagorda Bay. On a beach there, she will be waiting.

One look at that note and I knew this innately.

That and the beach at night, their bright fires.

Maggie and I walk through the house of holes and the rain pours through and cold drops strike my scalp. From under some rocks I manage to pull out Martin’s big canvas bag he used on his outdoor buddy excursions—still smelling of funk and fish—dragged it to my bedroom, stuff it. So tired, I just want to curl up.

Curl up and die , my brain banged at me. Not my mind. This came from my reptilian midbrain. Curl up now, Kev, and you will die.

Then that brain of mine shoots me up with adrenaline. My pupils dilate with a snap. My hands shake.

I hesitated before the fridge. They’d smashed the shelves and everything had dropped and congealed at the bottom, the stench nipping my sinuses. I closed the door, and that’s when I looked through the place where the kitchen window used to be.

There, on the cement, placed, no, presented in front of the bashed portable generators was my twelve-foot periwinkle blue tandem kayak, the oars lying neatly within the rear paddler’s well. A floor display at REI.

The kayak had been stored in the standalone garage, suspended by ropes and pulleys attached to the crossbeams, a condo for wintering mice. They’d bashed everything else, yet here sat this cleaned-up kayak.

Take me .

“No no,” I said chuckling. “No way. Not happening.” I looked at Maggie.

“We’ll be taking the K9 unit.”

Night was coming yet I knew I had to leave. I saw movement in the trees, scurrying silhouettes against the sky’s violet crown.

I had water, food, my bag and my dog. I sat behind the wheel of an Austin Police car with a full tank of gas. A loaded policeman’s shotgun stood near the gearshift and my glock was strapped snug at my side. I opened a crisp map of Texas, plotted my general course under the dome light, and pulled out. Highway 71 south. All the way to Matagorda Bay.